Speaker Biographies

Elaine Holmes, PhD, Imperial College

Prof. Holmes is the head of the Section of Computational and Systems Medicine and a professor of chemical biology in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College, in London, UK. She has over 20 years of experience in metabonomic technology and its applications. Her focus is on the discovery and development of metabolic biomarkers of disease in personalized health care and population studies with significant contributions to cardiovascular, neuroscience and infectious disease research. Recently Prof. Holmes has driven large-scale profiling efforts defining the concept of the metabolome-wide association study (MWAS) in molecular epidemiology, specifically exploring the link between hypertension, diet, and metabolic profiles. She has also developed methods for characterizing gut microbiome host metabolic interactions and has applied these to the study of gastrointestinal-related diseases including colorectal cancer, obesity, and IBD. She also has an established track record in the development of chemometric and statistical methods for analysis of omics data. Professor Holmes specific research focus areas include:

Kim Colson, PhD, Bruker Corporation

Kim Colson began her scientific and NMR career at Mount Holyoke College where she received a BA in chemistry. She continued her training in organic chemistry at The Pennsylvania State University, where she received a PhD with research focused on natural products structure elucidation and reaction dynamics using NMR spectroscopy. After a postdoctoral position at Yale University in pharmacology, she worked as an NMR spectroscopist for Bristol-Myers Squibb and Burroughs Wellcome and worked on structure and mechanism of action of natural products, small synthetic molecules, and proteins. She joined Bruker BioSpin in 1997, and is currently a business development manager for Bruker BioSpin. Most recently, her group has been focusing on metabolomics, quality control of dietary supplements and nutraceuticals, and developing fully automated material screening software.

Jason Burgess, PhD, RTI International

Jason Burgess is the program coordinator for the NIH Eastern Regional Comprehensive Metabolomics Resource Core at RTI (RCMRC). He has more than 20 years of experience using NMR to determine the molecular structure and conformation of synthetic and isolated molecules, and has worked with Dr. Sumner (the PI of the RCMRC) for five years to develop and apply metabolomics tools in the study of drug-induced liver injury and to provide metabolomics services to the National Toxicology Program and to the National Institutes of Environmental health Sciences. Dr. Burgess has worked with the RCMRC team to develop standards and procedures for ensuring quality control for metabolomics analyses, from data tracking through sample prep, data analysis, and data storage. He received a BS and PhD from the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University, and has worked at RTI since 1992.

Jeff Macdonald, PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jeff Macdonald, PhD, focuses on liver metabolism using NMR spectroscopy, but has studied nearly all tissues and many phyla. His graduate studies in the 1990s at the University of California at San Francisco involved in vivo 13C-NMR studies of glutathione kinetics in liver from intact rat, and included development of NMR-compatible bioreactor systems. He has continued applying 13C-labeled nutrient for flux studies in living systems, and in their tissue extracts since accepting his biomedical engineering faculty position in 2000 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where, in 2002, he founded the UNC Metabolomic Core Facility. This facility has focused on metabolomic and fluxomics of tissue extracts and NMR-compatible bioreactors. In 2006, in collaboration with North Carolina State University, the Marine MRI and Spectroscopy Facility was established with a 40-cm bore 4.7T MRI system, located at the NCSU Center for Marine Science and Technology at Morehead City, NC. The facility focuses on metabolomic imaging of marine organsims from coral to oysters and sea turtles.

Martin Kohlmeier, MD, PhD, North Carolina Research Campus

Martin Kohlmeier, MD, PhD, after medical school and residency training, completed graduate studies in bioinformatics, clinical chemistry, and laboratory medicine at Heidelberg University, at the Max-Planck-Institute for Nutrition Research in Dortmund, and later at the Free University in Berlin. He holds a faculty appointment in nutrition at the Medical School and the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also at the UNC Nutrition Research Institute in Kannapolis. His long-term interests concern the role of genetic variation in nutrient metabolism and the translation of nutrigenetic information into practice.

Rima Kaddurah-Daouk, PhD, Duke University

Dr. Kaddurah Daouk is the director of the Pharmacometabolomics Center at Duke University Medical Center, Durham. She received her education in biochemistry at the American University of Beirut and subsequently trained in molecular biology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she worked with Nobel Laureate Dr. Hamilton Smith on mechanism of protein-DNA recognition. Subsequent training and research at the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology enabled her to combine biochemical and biological approaches that led to the identification of genes and pathways possibly implicated in cancer biology and neuronal cell survival. She has authored key papers around the concept of energy impairment in disease and has over 40 patents and patent applications around her findings. These discoveries enabled the establishment of two biotechnology companies that moved the research from the bench to the clinic. Dr. Kaddurah-Daouk is one of the pioneers in the field of metabolomics and plays a leading role in its development. She established the Metabolomics Society and serves as its first president. She also cofounded one of the leading biotechnology companies in the field of metabolomics and is establishing a National Metabolomics Research Network. She is actively involved in organizing meetings and workshops in the field of metabolomics nationally and internationally. She joined the faculty at Duke University Medical Center department of psychiatry and then the Department of Biochemistry, where she is building several programs that bridge genetic and biochemical global omics approaches to bring a deeper understanding of pathways implicated in disease and in drug response.